The following article was written by award-winning journalist Desmond Allen as part of his Desmond Allen Interviews series. It was published in the Jamaica Observer on November 26, 2004. Delapenha died last week. (Part 2)

In Her majesty’s Service

All the time, Delapenha was being watched by the Munro sportsmaster Ken Dunleavy, an Englishman. Dunleavy, a very perceptive man, witnessed time after time the sheer athletic prowess of this outstanding student, especially in football, noticing too that he was not as academically blessed. After thinking over the matter, he wrote a letter to Delapenha’s mother, in which he suggested that she send him to England to seek to play club football. Mr and Mrs Delapenha discussed the suggestion. In any event, they had seen Lindy’s passion for sports and had resigned themselves to the fact that sports would be his future.

“My father drummed up the money and I went to England on a boat called the

Lady Nelson, a vessel taking home wounded prisoners of war from Japan and Germany by way of Jamaica. I paid 40 pounds sterling,” he recalls.

This was November 1945. On the high seas on his way to England, Delapenha went over in his mind the plan given to him by Dunleavy who had also written a letter of introduction for him to take with him. He was to enlist in the British army and ask to be assigned to the Physical Training Corps where many sportsmen were discovered. It was also here that many athletes were placed, a strategic move to protect the sportsmen from front line battle, he says.

The corps is remembered for the outstanding Blackpool outside right, Stanley Matthews. But once in England, Delapenha was placed in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. This was not the plan Dunleavy had so carefully laid out, but fate was at work.

Delapenha’s infantry was dispatched to Egypt in the Middle East where he spent 18 months. From the land of the Pharaohs, he did service in Greece. But importantly, while there, his football skills were discovered. Professional football had been suspended in England during the war. With the fighting over, England was putting its life back together and professional scouts were out looking for potential players to restart the competitions.

Delapenha was sent on a physical training course in Gaza, Palestine where he placed first and a scout saw him and got excited. But the battalion commander decided he would not let him go, wanting him to remain to continue representing the battalion in athletics and cricket.

In cricket there, he recalls playing against the great Tom Graveney of Gloucester and England, making 115 runs against his batallion. Out in Egypt, he also played hockey and participated in diving exhibitions. In one such event he knocked out a tooth when he hit the bottom of the pool.

The Delapenha Waltz

On the eve of his departure from the army, Delapenha was playing football one day when a scout saw a flash of brilliance and gave him a letter to take to Arsenal FC. That did not work out and he went to Portsmouth near Southhampton in the south of England for a trial game with its reserved team against the Rovers. This was 1948. At half time, Manager Bob Jackson decided he had seen enough and signed Delapenha immediately. He played inside right for Portsmouth for two years, gaining a First Division League Championship medal in the 1948 season.

For a time he was dogged by injuries, including a hamstring pull that sidelined him for six weeks. Today that would be remedied in half the time, he reflects. With the first team, he played one game in 1948 and eight first-team games in 1949. He also played in the reserves and ended with a total of 44 League matches for Portsmouth before being transferred to Middlesbrough for 6,000 pounds.

It was at Middlesbrough, also affectionately called Boro, where he would spend the next nine years, that Delapenha achieved legend status, scoring 90 goals in 260 League games. Newspaper headlines serving the area told the story of Delapenha’s exploits, as the first black overseas player in the English League: “Delapenha’s a floodlit dazzler”; “Boro waste all Lindy’s good work”; “The Delapenha waltz”; “Delapenha the artist”; “Delapenha was Boro’s only good forward” and the like.

In a special section on the history of the Middlesbrough Football Club, the

Evening Gazette of February 16, 1991, gave back page exposure to a cartoon caricature of Delapenha and wrote: “…He had one of the hardest shots of any Boro player and scored many of his goals before the goalkeeper could move. He scored 100 goals in 300 appearances and in the 1953-54 relegation season he was the top scorer with 18 goals.”

At Middlesbrough, Lindy earned 12 pounds a week, and got an additional two pounds for each game won and one pound for each game drawn. Among the teams beaten by Lindy’s Boro were Newcastle and Sunderland. Boro remained in the first division for his first six years, getting as close as fourth place in the League in 1954, before being relegated to second division.

Woman of his dreams

While at Boro, Delapenha met the woman of his dreams. Joan Crawford was a school teacher and a bright and beautiful woman, he says. He knew immediately that she would be his wife. They have three children — the late Paul Delapenha who died of cancer in 1997; Linda Delapenha-Wynter and Marie-Clare Lyons, remembered for her second placing in a Miss Jamaica World pageant in the 1980s. You’ll forgive Lindy as he dotes about grandson Bradley Wynter, “the brightest thing you’ll ever see”.

But before all that he would leave Boro after a string of severe injuries, to join third division team Mansfield Town on transfer. He was now in the 30s. Mansfield, about eight miles from Nottingham in the English midlands, would come to worship Delapenha. He spent four years there in which he delighted the crowds with something they had rarely seen. And then it was time to go home.

The home-coming

He accepted a job offer from the Sugar Manufacturers’ Arthur Bonito who played cricket for Jamaica and returned home in 1964. As sports co-ordinator, his task was to organise all the sporting activities of the various sugar estates across the island — about 18 of them at the time. He also coached several teams. The highpoint of the job, which lasted for a year, was the staging of field days for the various sports. But over the years sugar had been losing its status as king, and when the industry went bad, the Sugar Manufacturers offered him a lump sum and a ticket for his passage back to England. He took the money and tore up the ticket. Delapenha was home for good.

Roy Lawrence and the JBC

Roy Lawrence was in charge of

JBC Sports and invited Delapenha to join him there in 1966. Three weeks into the job as sports commentator, Delapenha was thrown in at the deep end. Lawrence went off to cover the five-Test England-West Indies series in England and Delapenha found himself with the formidable task of co-ordinatingJBC’s coverage of the huge Commonwealth Games, under the direction of Merrick Needham, who was put in charge of the local organising committee. But Delapenha did well, and when Lawrence left the station in 1968, he was appointed director of sports atJBC.

He and Lawrence took credit for bringing international football to local television, although, according to Delapenha, the viewers were terribly against it. “But we persisted. And look at the interest in overseas football today,” he exclaimed. “Nowadays you often get the foreign sports news before the local!”

At the

JBC he worked at different times with people like Wycliffe Bennett, Gloria Lannaman, Tino Barovier, Hector Bernard, Dennis Hall, Leonie Forbes, Desmond Chambers, Headley Thompson whom he poached fromThe Gleaner, Hugh Crosskill jnr, Allie McNab, Tino Geddes, Patrick Anderson, Pat Lazarus and Gladstone Wilson, among a host of other familiar names.

He moved to

Morning Time on television in 1987 and hosted it for 10 years, with Erica Allen, Fae Ellington and Darcy Tulloch. TheJBC was sold to the RJR Group in 1997 and he was informed that he and Ellington were too old for TV, bringing his career at the corporation to an end after 30 years.

These days, he spends time playing golf and assisting his friend Donald Chong who operates Yes Golf in the Trade Centre on Red Hills Road, opting to take payment in the form of access to free equipment to play golf. He also does some commentary on horse racing for

KLAS SportsRadio where the famous voice stills holds listeners, as if he were born for this thing.